


The Painted Isle

by pureselfindulgence



Category: White Collar
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Related, Mild Sexual Content, Multi, Painting, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-24
Updated: 2013-08-24
Packaged: 2017-12-24 12:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/939777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pureselfindulgence/pseuds/pureselfindulgence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With Peter in prison, Elizabeth and Neal take an unusual route to finding the comfort they both need.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Painted Isle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rabidchild67](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidchild67/gifts).



> Written for rabidchild's H/C Comfest 2013 prompt: "Neal/El take comfort in each other, post 4x16." 
> 
> Also, this is AU to the extent that Sara doesn't exist, and P/E/N have been established for a while. (Nothing against Sara, I just can't fit Neal/Sara in my head at the same time as P/E/N. Lack of imagination, I s'pose.)

When Peter is arrested, it is catastrophic. It is like a bomb going off, the great devastation, the great desecration of all that is known and stable. Elizabeth spends the first day in breathless shock, numb to her fingertips, suffused with that dreamlike unreality that follows an explosion.

At his preliminary hearing, she still cannot believe what has happened. She listens blankly to the proceedings, to the judge deciding not to allow bail. Neal is not there. 

Afterwards, she steals a few precious moments with Peter across the courtroom bar, and the brief touch that is all they are allowed by a watchful bailiff is what starts to bring her back to her senses.

Naturally, when she gets back home, running the gauntlet of clamorous reporters, she lets herself lose them all. She weeps an ocean of anguish, tear by tear. She terrifies Satchmo by giving in, by letting herself feel rage and despair and worry and fear and grief. She gives in to madness, in short, and yet there is a method there.

After an explosion, you must pull down all the rubble and clear it all away, if you hope ever to have a stable foundation again. It will be three days, three long days until she can visit Peter, before she can see her husband again, so she might as well put the time to good use.

At the long-awaited visit, she is ready, even if her calm is the calm of exhaustion. She _needs_ to be calm...needs to build that stable foundation. For him. For them. They must survive this, and with their hands pressed to the clear partition, she and Peter spend the entire time telling each other that they will.

Nevertheless, the week leading up to the next visit is hard. The reporters camped outside her business, outside their _home_ , won't stay away no matter how often the police shoo them off. Of course they won't. An FBI agent accused of killing a senator? It's gold for them, never mind that it's torture for Elizabeth. The phone rings constantly, sixteen hours a day, more, and she finds herself thinking that it's not like an explosion anymore, that it is more like a flood. She has to fight not to be swept away.

Neal is conspicuous by his absence. She can't pretend it doesn't hurt, after all they've been through together, but the point is that they've been through it together, and she knows at least as well as Peter how he works. His instinct will always be to run or to go to ground, and she supposes it is best that with all this scrutiny, there is no one to see another man sleeping at the house.

That is, at least, what she tells herself, especially in the evenings. Especially when the living room is illuminated by a certain slant of light, the one that at this time of year, used to mean that her boys would be walking through the front door any minute. Especially when she lets Satchmo coat the comforter with golden hair, because the bed that was so cozy for three is only cold and dwarfing for one.

Especially when Peter mentions, at the second visit, that Neal hasn't shown up once, and asks about him, and she has to tell him that their lover has been assiduously avoiding her.

To her surprise, Peter is neither upset nor angry. He just shakes his head, perhaps a little exasperated, but also visibly concerned.

"El, you can't let him do this," he tells her. "You _know_ what's probably going on in his head."

She can't quite hide the hurt, the hint of anger—not because she blames Neal for what has happened, but because Peter's been going through hell, she's been going through hell, and _Neal hasn't been there._

"He's being selfish," she says.

"He's being insecure," Peter corrects, gently admonishing. "He's being Neal."

***

It takes a few hours, but in the end, Elizabeth has to admit that for once, Peter is the voice of reason, although she really knew the truth of what he was saying all along. She already knew that Neal, so sophisticated and confident in everything else, has always had his one fatal flaw, the one gaping vulnerability.

Before she goes to bed, that wrenchingly lonely bed, she sends him a text. She doesn't ask, doesn't entreat him to answer as she has in the past days. 

_I'm coming over tomorrow evening,_ she writes, and with a hint of sternness that he will assuredly pick up on, adds, _Be there._

Peter is right. Enough is enough. The next day, she slips the tails on her, marches up to the apartment prepared to brook no nonsense.

And when Neal opens his door, she instantly forgives him everything.

In just these past weeks, he has become thinner, and there are shadows above his sharpened cheekbones. His clothes are immaculate, perfectly pressed, but the man inside them looks rumpled. What stabs her to the heart, though, is that he looks almost frightened of her. Frightened—of _her!_

In his unguarded expression, she can read everything—the excruciating guilt, the terror of anger and abandonment and loss, the terror of _being_ lost. She can see the floodwaters dark in his eyes.

She takes his face between her hands and kisses him, pretending that she can't feel him trembling, can't feel him sag when she says, quietly, "We don't blame you, Neal...but we miss you."

Now the water in his eyes is salty, but before he can say a thing, a single syllable, she hushes him.

"Let's not talk about it right now," she says. "I think we both need some, some normalcy. Let's just have dinner, and talk, and be _normal_ with each other."

He nods, and he tries. She can tell how hard he tries, but as easily as they fall into step in the kitchen, into a routine developed long ago, and as glibly as they chat about trivialities, all of Neal's smiles are brilliant cons...and like so many brilliant things, easy to shatter.

What does it, of all ridiculous things, is the soufflé. Neal normally makes a chocolate soufflé for her that is almost better than sex, even though it never lasts as long. It is her favorite dessert, and he attempts it for her tonight, but he can't achieve that delicate alchemy. It collapses.

The damn soufflé collapses, and Neal's hands are suddenly shaking as he pulls the poor sad thing from the oven, and he gives her a look that begs, _Please stop making me pretend everything is fine._

She considers how heartsick _she_ is, and she takes the soufflé away and puts her arms around him.

And she thinks about islands. 

If their private catastrophe is a flood and not an explosion, there is a way you survive those, too. You build an island, a perfect sandbag-shielded center, where the flood cannot penetrate. You do this so that you don't drown, so that the things most precious to you are not lost or ruined.

Elizabeth wonders where it could be, the place where the waters cannot reach them. Then she looks around the apartment, and she realizes. She puts a steadying hand on the back of Neal's neck, looks intently into his face.

"Paint something for me," she says. And hell, because at a time like this there's nothing wrong with escapism, with asking for something she loves from somebody she loves, or even with heavy-handed metaphor, she elaborates on her request.

"Paint me an island, Neal."

***

It isn't done that night, or for many nights to come. But there is healing, healing that begins on that crucial night when she sits at the kitchen table and watches him grind pigments, mull paints. He has an entire case of paints already formulated, but for this, for her island, he starts from scratch. And as she watches him cut linseed oil into sparkling pigment, then rub it smooth between glass and stone, again and again, she thinks that this is only right.

From the very beginning, she has loved watching him when he is creating art, when he is creating beauty. There is something even more elemental there than there is when he is in bed with her, with Peter. All the energy, all the vitality that normally charges the air all around Neal gets sucked into his skin, funneled through his hands, honed to a fine point. She loves his focus, loves the way he loses his self-awareness and gains his self. He is never more her Neal than when he is sketching, sculpting, painting.

There is something infinitely soothing, warming, calming in watching him work. And she can tell that it helps him, too. His hands never shake when they hold a paintbrush. The tension begins to drain from his shoulders as soon as he picks one up. So, each night, she steals away to the apartment and kisses him, steers him to the easel, and sits down to watch, often all without a single word spoken.

And thus do they build their sandbag fortifications; thus do they defend against the flood.

The day after he finishes the underpainting, carefully layering light over dark, he goes with her to visit Peter. They all laugh and cry and exchange apologies and promises and reassurances, and know that Neal will not miss another visit.

Elizabeth watches her island materialize, night by night, under Neal's clever brushstrokes. He gives her deep azure waters, sunny skies of the most delicate and ethereal blue, pristine white beaches bordered by an exquisite riot of flowering greenery. He puts in a cottage, beautifully rustic, with a yellow Labrador asleep on the vine-tangled porch.

They go see Peter again, and talk about the painting. Together they explore the island, spinning fairy tales of carefree bliss, describing what it will contain for each of them. The flowers and the beaches are for El, and there must be stunning scenery and good swimming for Neal. Peter wants satellite television, so that he won't miss any games. They laugh and chatter, babbling words with no meaning other than affirmation, no meaning other than _I love you_ , until it is time to leave him for another week.

Neal finishes the painting, adding in the most painstaking detail with his finest brushes. It is an island in a dream, so sublimely paradisiacal that it takes the breath away. And the cottage has a satellite dish on the roof.

That night, El clasps him by a paint-stained hand and draws him into the bedroom. They make love for the first time since Peter's arrest, quietly and tenderly, for comfort and closeness rather than lust.

Afterward, she slips out of bed and goes to stand in front of the painting, and Neal comes out to join her. His warm presence behind her, his warm arms holding her close, are exactly what she needs.

She gestures to the painted isle.

"When Peter's back home, we will all go find one just like that," she says. 

She feels his nod, cranes her neck until she can look up at him. In the dim light, Neal's eyes are sad and determined, but once again nearly as blue as the flawless skies in front of them.

"Just like that," he agrees.

And she believes that they will.


End file.
